Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The wife pulled at his arm and he threw off her hand. But he relented, and followed her back to their car.

  The wife saw that the husband had parked the car crookedly at the curb. It was a large gleaming new-model Acura, a beautiful silvery-green color, yet parked so carelessly it looked clownish. The husband saw this too and drew in his breath sharply.

  “What the hell? I didn’t park the car like this.”

  “You must have.”

  “I said, I did not.”

  “Then who did?”

  “You drove.”

  “I did not drive! You drove.”

  “You drove, and you parked the car like a drunken woman or a—a senile woman. Lucky we aren’t in town, you’d have a ticket.”

  “But I didn’t here. I would never have driven here. I didn’t even bring my handbag, with my driver’s license.”

  “Driving without a license! That’s points on your license.”

  The wife was deeply agitated. The smell of the burnt house and what had burnt inside it was still in her nostrils. Badly she wanted to flee home and lie down on the bed and hide her face and sleep but in the corner of her eye she saw a figure approaching her and the husband, from the house across the cul-de-sac. A white-haired woman, genteel, with kindly eyes, in gardening clothes, on her head a wide-brimmed straw hat. On her hands, gloves. The wife saw that the white-haired woman had been tending to roses bordering the driveway of her house, a striking red-brick Edwardian with a deep front lawn. Obviously, the white-haired woman had, like the wife, a gardener-helper who came at least once a week to till the soil for her and take out the worst of the weeds.

  “Excuse me! Hello.”

  The white-haired woman removed her soiled gloves, smiling at the husband and the wife. Hers was a beautiful ruin of a face, soft as a leather glove; her nose was thin, aristocratic. Her small mouth was pale primrose-pink.

  “Are you—by any chance—considering that house? I mean—to buy?”

  “To buy? The house isn’t in any condition to be inhabited.”

  “Yes. But it could be rebuilt and repaired.”

  “And it isn’t for sale anyway, so far as we can see. Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I mean—it might be listed with a Realtor. Realtors’ signs aren’t allowed in Crescent Lake Farms.”

  The white-haired woman smiled at them wistfully. She went on to say how hopeful they all were, on West Crescent Drive, that someone would buy the house soon, and restore it. “What a beautiful house it was! This is all such a shame and a—tragedy.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “The fire was—wasn’t—an accident. So the investigators ruled.”

  “Who set the fire, if it wasn’t an accident? One of the sons?”

  Seeing that the husband was eager to know, the white-haired woman became cautious. She backed away, though with a polite smile.

  “No one knows. Not definitely.”

  “Was there a son? A teenager?”

  “There’s an investigation—ongoing. It’s been years now. I don’t know anything more.”

  “You must know if they died in the fire? Someone did die—yes?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? The Jesters, of course. How many of them died in the fire?”

  The husband was speaking harshly. The wife was embarrassed at his vehemence, with this gracious stranger. She tugged at his arm, to bring him back to himself.

  “‘The Jesters’? I don’t understand.”

  “What was the name of the family who lived here?”

  “I—don’t remember. I have to leave now.”

  The white-haired woman turned quickly away. That so gracious a person would turn her back on fellow residents of Crescent Lake Farms was astonishing to the wife though the husband grunted as if such rude behavior only confirmed his suspicions.

  “Let’s go. ‘The Jesters’ are taboo, it seems.”

  The husband drove. At the intersection of West Crescent Drive with a smaller road called Lilac Terrace he turned left, thinking to take a short cut to Juniper, and home; but Lilac Terrace turned out, as the wife might have told the husband, to be a dead end. NO OUTLET.

  After some maneuvering, the husband and the wife returned home to 88 East Crescent Drive. In their absence, the house had remained unchanged.

  THE HUSBAND SWUNG his legs out of bed in panic thinking that someone had entered the house to shoot them.

  They went to the window which was a floor-to-ceiling window with a balcony, rarely used. Because of the Jesters’ unpredictable noises, the husband and the wife no longer opened this window even on summer nights.

  The husband’s face was mottled with rage, and fear. The wife thought I will comfort him all the days of our lives.

  It was the morning of July Fourth. The Jesters were celebrating early.

  BETRAYAL

  THE FIRST CLEAR SYMPTOMS WERE AT THANKSGIVING, last year.

  Our son arrived hours late. It has long been our family custom to gather at our house at 4:00 P.M. and to sit down to eat at about 5:30 P.M. and yet it was nearly 6:00 P.M. when Rickie arrived—after having assured us he would arrive at about 1:00 P.M. We were so grateful to see him that no one, even Father, had a harsh word to say to him though we noted how defensive Rickie was saying he’d been driving six hours, stuck in traffic on the damned freeway and wasn’t in a mood to be criticized now.

  Outside it was deeply-dark, windswept and wintry. And wet. When Rickie entered the house a gust of wind accompanied him and struck at the crackling fire in the fireplace, that Father had been tending with a poker. And there came with him a smell of rain so sharp it seemed metallic, odors of earth and leaves and something rank as an animal’s wetted hide that pinched at our nostrils.

  We were already sitting at dinner. Rickie’s place awaited him. He mumbled an excuse and disappeared upstairs for ten minutes presumably washing up, changing his rumpled clothes, but when he appeared again downstairs we saw that he’d done little more than run a comb through his matted hair, that hadn’t been washed in a while, and he was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, not freshly laundered, and running shoes. He’d left off his Sigma Nu hoodie at least, upstairs.

  Some of us were offended, frankly, that Rickie should sit down at Thanksgiving dinner looking so disheveled. His jaws were unshaven, his eyes were edgy and glittering. His laughter was high-pitched, a nervous sort of laughter, that faded abruptly like a switch shut off. Rickie’s younger nephews and nieces and cousins were hurt that he paid virtually no attention to them, as he usually did.

  Practically the first thing Rickie said when he took his place among us, as warm platters were being passed in his direction, was that he would “forgo” turkey this year, thanks!

  Forgo turkey we protested, how can you forgo turkey when turkey is the point of Thanksgiving we pointed out to the unshaven boy in the soiled San Diego Zoo T-shirt but Rickie said with a smirk, Not for the poor turkey it ain’t.

  Ain’t is not a word we use in our family. Not a word that Rickie with a cum laude B.A. degree from Stanford and whose SAT scores were in the highest fifth percentile would use. Ain’t was a jab in the ribs meant to offend and annoy and so ain’t did offend and annoy us, particularly Father who stared at Rickie speechless. Mother, who’d been preparing for Thanksgiving dinner for two days and who’d purchased an “organic” twenty-two-pound turkey for the occasion, blinked and stared at Rickie as if he’d slapped her.

  We asked, are you a vegetarian and Rickie said yes that was right.

  A vegetarian! Since when?

  But Rickie just shrugged. He appeared to be starved spooning large portions of Mother’s bread crumb stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes, candied carrots and broccoli-with-almonds onto his plate. We recalled his legendary appetite for any kind of meat including pizza-with-sausage and cheeseburgers, when he’d been a teenager in our household.

  Mother said, trying to smile, “Well! At least I hope you are not one of those vegans . . .�
��

  In Mother’s mouth vegan was uncertainly enunciated. Rickie laughed and said, “No Mom: not yet.”

  Mother’s bread crumb stuffing was particularly delicious this year, made with apples, prunes, chestnuts, thyme, tarragon, fine-cut onions and celery. In the lush salad of many gourmet greens were tiny sections of clementines, dried cranberries, chopped escarole, cherry tomatoes from Mexico. The mashed sweet potatoes were (secretly) laced with marshmallow—one of Mother’s prized family recipes. All of these foods, plus chunks of thick raisin bread, Rickie ate as if he were famished. (It was curious to see how Rickie avoided even looking at the turkey carcass on the sideboard, that looked as if ravenous hyenas had attacked it. And even the harmless gravy boat, with its rich oily turkey gravy.) When we asked him about his closest friends from college he replied in distracted grunts. Mother dared to ask him about Holly Cryer, a prep school girlfriend whom Rickie often saw when they were both home from college, but Rickie only just frowned and shrugged. Instead he spoke excitedly of Mitzie, Claus, Herc (for Hercules), Kindle, Stalker, Big Joe and Juno. We said, “Oh but Rickie, those are animals. That is your work.”

  Rickie was currently an intern at the San Diego Zoo, at the bonobo exhibit. That day it seemed that, in our company, listening to our conversation, Rickie was frequently elsewhere, and listening intently to another conversation that drew him more powerfully. Almost dreamily now he paused in his rapid chewing to gaze at us one by one, around the table. As if he were counting us, or hoping to discover, in our familiar faces, something he recognized. We could see a fringe of dark-matted chest hair just visible at the stretched neckline of his zoo-issue T-shirt.

  “Oh hey Mom, Dad—all you guys: I’ve been trying to tell you. My work is my life.”

  Certainly it was good news that Rickie was employed now, if only as an unpaid intern. (For an unpaid internship might lead to paid employment someday—that was the belief among the families of recent college graduates like ours.) And it was good news that Rickie seemed to be devoted to this work.

  But since his employment was only temporary, at the San Diego Zoo, and not the employment for which he’d been preparing himself for four years at Stanford, this was possibly not so very good news.

  It had been his parents’ dream that Rickie would go to medical school. Or, failing that, Rickie might go into high-level medical research—at a pharmaceutical company, for instance. (Father, a quite successful corporate lawyer at Helix Pharmaceuticals in Vista Flats, California, whose long-ago dream for himself had been scientific research, had contacts in several prominent pharmaceutical companies.)

  Yet, Rickie seemed happy. Rickie seemed defiantly happy.

  Just after graduation, when he’d returned home to Saddle Creek, from his Stanford frat house, Rickie had seemed very unhappy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Rickie had been seriously depressed. That spring he’d been interviewed for a number of promising entry-level positions with California employers but—(so far as we knew)—no offers had followed. Rickie had also, following Father’s encouragement, applied to a miscellany of West Coast universities to enter a Ph.D. program in biology, but even where he’d been accepted as a graduate student, he hadn’t been offered a fellowship. And so, he’d been inert with disappointment lying on his bed or sprawled on our family-room sofa stretched out like a rubber band that has lost its elasticity.

  Son, don’t do this, we pleaded with him. Don’t give in.

  Particularly, Father was repelled at the thought of giving in.

  Rickie was unshaven then. Bristly whiskers marring his boyish face. And his eyes glazed with boredom, or something worse.

  He wasn’t giving in, he protested. He was exploring, within.

  Anyway he couldn’t help it. His generation was the Walking Wounded devastated by graduating from college and being expelled into the world that didn’t give a shit for them, B.A. honors from Stanford or whatever.

  Sure some of his college friends had definite plans. Not his closest frat-brother friends but others who’d gotten into med school, or law school, even if not first-rate schools, still the contrast with Rickie’s own life narrow and circumscribed as his bed, or the family-room, sofa—no wonder he was feeling down.

  Had to take solace from the fact that there were plenty of others in his generation who frankly had no plans, not even prospects for plans.

  At Saddle Creek Academy which was in the highest percentile of California private schools Rickie had taken nearly every science course offered, most of them AP courses. And he’d had other AP courses. Usually high grades and the praise of his teachers. And the SATs—we hired tutors for him, reasoning that, as other parents hired tutors for their children, we would be disadvantaging our son by not hiring tutors; and the expenditure, which had been considerable, had paid off. With Father’s encouragement Rickie had looked ahead to medical school at San Francisco, Yale, Harvard, as well as Stanford—the very best.

  One of his closest Sigma Nu brothers had died only a few weeks after graduation, in his parents’ basement TV room in La Jolla. A lethal combination of (prescription) Xanax and OxyContin the twenty-one-year-old had bought from a fourteen-year-old dealer in the parking lot of Saddle Creek High.

  There were signs we might have noted, that Rickie might not get into his first-choice med school. For though he’d been an A-student in high school, in his first year at Stanford he’d run into a solid-concrete wall, as he described it, with organic chemistry, physics, and calculus, got messed up at mid-terms and never quite recovered his self-confidence; without informing his parents he had shifted to a less demanding major—some sort of science-culture studies, “environmental biology.” Why’d he want to spend his life analyzing chemicals in a lab, examining the molecular underpinnings of animals without any notion of what the original animal looked like, or was; sure it was exciting that the genetic code was being broken, through such exacting experiments, but Rickie found abstractions Bor-ing!

  He’d always liked animals—some animals. Like horses, giraffes. He’d loved our mixed-breed shepherd Strongheart who’d pined for Rickie when Rickie left home for Stanford, though, when he’d lived in our household, Rickie had had a decreasing amount of time to devote to the eager dog whose care and tending naturally fell to Mother. (Not that Mother complained!—Mother was never one to complain.)

  Yet, Rickie’s luck turned when he received a summer internship at the San Diego Zoo. We hadn’t had any idea that Rickie had applied for such a position, at such a place, until, as Rickie proudly announced to us, it was a fate accomplished.

  Father had said, speaking carefully as if fearing he might be misunderstood, “An internship is—unpaid?”

  But Rickie’s good spirits could not be dashed, now that they’d been fired up like gasoline sprinkled onto a dying fire. He told Father that working at the San Diego Zoo was known to be so cool for kids his age, everybody says they’d pay the zoo for the chance.

  Mother said, “It sounds just wonderful! Rickie can try again applying to medical schools, or to graduate schools, and with this internship in his résumé, he’ll be a—shoo-in.”

  Shoo-in was gaily uttered by Mother, in an outburst of optimism. Shoo-in was not an expression ever heard on Mother’s lips before this moment.

  Two weeks after Rickie’s first day as an intern at the zoo, we flew south to San Diego to visit with him. In his infrequent calls and e-mails home he’d told us how “great” his colleagues were and how “special” bonobos are—not just “great apes” but unique among these, genetically the closest of all primates to Homo sapiens.

  Even before we saw Rickie in his zoo uniform assisting an older staff member at the bonobo enclosure, even before we saw Rickie grinning and “signing” to one of the friendly bonobos through the immense glass window protecting the bonobos from zoo visitors—we felt unease, that our son whom we knew so well was being seduced by this new milieu, which was so exotic and so strange to us.

  We’d arranged with Ricki
e that we would meet him in front of the bonobo enclosure at about noon, and would take him to lunch; but when we arrived, breathless and just slightly intimidated—(for the San Diego Zoo is an enormous place!)—there was Rickie standing at the side of a tall broad-shouldered woman with ash-colored hair addressing a gathering of about a dozen visitors. Seeing us, Rickie only just smiled, nodded and waved, without speaking to us. You could see—(that is, we could see)—that our twenty-one-year-old son greatly admired this woman, as he’d admired a few of his Stanford professors; so intently did he listen to her words, observing the bonobos in the enclosure as she spoke of them, it was as if Rickie were memorizing the experience and didn’t want to be distracted from it.

  But how happy Rickie appeared! This was something of a surprise for we hadn’t seen Rickie so boyishly enthusiastic since his small triumphs in high school athletics years before. And how very different he seemed, in his smart red San Diego Zoo cap, red sweatshirt and fresh-laundered denims, from the melancholy boy laid low by lethargy, depression, and irony in his boyhood room at Saddle Creek.

  Mother whispered to Father, “Oh! is that our son? He looks so . . .”

  “He does,” Father said. “Thank God!”

  Unobtrusively we drew near, to listen to the ashy-haired woman talk about the bonobos and answer visitors’ questions. Truly, the woman, whose name tag identified her as HILARY KRYDY, was impressive. She was tall and fit and her face was both plain and powerfully attractive, with an energy and purposefulness that exuded from within. She might have been Mother’s age but looked much more robust and youthful. We were directed to look closely at the bonobos, as Hilary spoke. An exhibit in a zoo at which we might have simply glanced—registering some kind of large antic “monkey”—now took on dramatic significance. In the enclosure, which looked like actual wilderness landscape with rocks and boulders, small exotic trees, a pond, the coarse-furred little apes were wonderfully lively and alert as if showing off for their human audience. They rose from all fours with a sort of gawky grace to their hind legs and “walked”—very like human beings. (Mother said, “Oh—are they imitating us?” Father chuckled saying, “Certainly not. Their species precedes us.”) We could understand that Rickie would be drawn to the bonobos as crudely inferior types of himself.